Will Eddie Rispone "tort reform" Hard Rock victims out of their fair share?

The city says the demolition, clean up, and recovery operations following the Hard Rock hotel collapse have cost something on the order of  $400,000 per day. That's bound to be a sensitive issue, particularly now that we are heavy into budget season. The mayor assures us, though, that we're going to make sure we're covered.

The presence of police, firefighters and other city workers on the site has been costing taxpayers about $400,000 a day Cantrell said Monday, pledging that those costs would be recouped once the “responsible party” for the disaster is found.

“We’re making sure every step of the way the liability is with the responsible party, and that is not with the city of New Orleans,” Cantrell said.

Determining responsible parties is going to be critical in this case because, unlike many of the disasters we are used to around here, this one won't draw any help from FEMA. The city has also set up a "resource center" at  the Main Library for workers and business owners who were affected by the disruption.  Also there is an intake survey for businesses to fill out online here. Presumably, even the "disrespectful" businesses are allowed to do this.

Despite a week-and-a-half-long interruption to daily life at one of the city’s busiest intersections, Cantrell said displaced residents and many business owners have shown patience. But she also said some businesses had been "downright disrespectful" and impatient in the face of closures and evacuations. She didn't name any of them.

Inevitably all of this is headed to court where the city and various other aggrieved parties will look to hold Hard Rock, the developer Mohan Kailas, and the primary contractor Citadel Builders accountable for damages.  Multiple lawsuits have already been filed.  Because Citadel and its subcontractors had been in the practice of misclassifying workers, many victims and families may not be eligible for healthcare or worker's comp benefits.   In the absence of federal disaster relief, legal action is likely the only recourse for everyone.

Meanwhile, the statewide election is into its runoff stage. Republicans are on the verge of capturing legislative supermajorities and possibly the Governor's office. One of the animating issues for them this year has been "tort reform."

Oil and gas isn’t the only business sector trying to attribute Louisiana’s problems to trial lawyers The Louisiana Association of Business and Industry has long been engaged in demonizing trial lawyers as the bane of Louisiana business, while they’ve waged a campaign for “civil justice reform”, as they’re now calling it. LABI has long been the primary financial backer of Louisiana Lawsuit Abuse Watch, which claims to be “a citizen watchdog group dedicated to stopping lawsuit abuse that threatens local businesses and jobs.”

The remaining Republican candidate for Governor happens to own a large construction industry firm himself.  He has some pretty strong opinions about the rights of injured workers and governments to sue companies who have caused them injury. 

Rispone, who compared himself to President Donald Trump, pointed to Louisiana’s natural resources, including oil and gas, that he said should be bringing the state jobs.

“Lawsuit abuse is killing thousands of jobs,” Rispone said. “You know that better than anybody.”

The soon to be governing power in the State of Louisiana defines the only available path to remuneration for disrupted small businesses, compensation for depleted public finances, justice for injured workers, and reparations for a despoiled environment as "lawsuit abuse" and wants it obliterated. 

Once this radical faction is in office, will it move to obstruct justice for the Hard Rock victims? If so, who will speak out for them? Don't count on the Advocate editorial board.  In its endorsement of John Bel Edwards, the paper offered a few issues on which it continues to disagree with him.

There are, after all, many problems to solve, and we haven’t always agreed with the governor’s approach to the state’s underlying challenges. Louisiana needs a governor who supports tort reform and will stand up to trial lawyers and teacher unions. Lawsuits against energy companies put our state at a disadvantage when it comes to attracting investment.

Once the dust blown about by a building collapsed by criminal capitalism has settled, and the damage incurred by its several victims endures, don't expect much sympathy from the local media monopoly. Not when there is still "investment" to attract and unions to crush, anyway.  

Today, in #Bothsides at the Daily Georges

This afternoon the front page of the Daily Georges website is highlighting a letter writer aruging in favor of Drew Brees's constiutional right to wittingly associate his professional marketing persona with a despicable hate group. Go find it if you want to read it.  It figures that the letter writer specifically praises the Advocate's decision to print a dishonest opinion piece about the subject by resident toad Dan Fagan earilier in the week.

We went over this the other day, but just to reiterate, the problem we have with their decision to publish Dan Fagan is not that he writes opinions we do not like. The problem is he writes bullshit opinions constructed from deliberate lies about the subject of his opining. Giving him a platform on the editorial page, in turn, sets the boundaries of subsequent discusssion to encompass his bullshit as an acceptable premise.  This generates more letters and opinions based on that bullshit which the paper is then only too happy to print and highlight on their web page thus reifying the bullshit further.

None of this is an accident. It is a deliberate editorial choice which reveals the preferred inclination of the paper's management which is clearly quite favorable toward bullshit.

For example, last week, this happened.

Congratulations to the Daily Georges on 1) running a syndicated Rich Lowry column downplaying "hysteria" over climate change and then 2) printing two different reaction letters in order to "bothsides" the hell out of climate change pic.twitter.com/3x33rpDkaW

— skooks (@skooks) September 7, 2019

Bullshit. It's just one side of an irresolvable "civil" debate.

This blog will sell to John Georges for one million dollars

He probably won't buy it, though.  He seems to have it in his head that there are too many "dangerous people" on the internet.  And, from his point of view, maybe that's true. Those people will just bring up any old thing if you don't watch them closely.  So I guess we shouldn't be too surprised that when Georges does decide to buy a website, he does it mainly to fire everybody.

New Orleans Advocate owners Dathel and John Georges have purchased The Times-Picayune and its nola.com website from the Newhouse family’s Advance Local Media.

The Advocate will publish a seven-day, home-delivered newspaper in New Orleans using the brands and features of both publications. The new paper will debut in June. The two papers’ websites will be combined under the nola.com brand around the same time.

According to Georges, this is being done in order to "ensure a strong print and online news company for years to come.” But you'd forgive us if we weren't entirely sold on the proposition that the "brands and features" of the two papers are worth as much to the reader minus the work of the actual reporters who once produced their content.  Georges laid off every single T-P employee effective 60 days from now. We haven't been told how many can expect to be hired on to the new company but the early indications are it will be very few. I guess, technically, you can call that an "expansion" of the Advocate.  The Advocate is certainly calling it that, anyway. 

The Advocate will be expanding its New Orleans news, advertising and circulation staff by hiring from current nola.com and Times-Picayune employees, and will increase its coverage of suburban communities, sports, and arts and entertainment, and also improve its opinion pages.

How will they be improving the opinion pages, exactly?  Somehow I doubt the opinions will improve. The current version of the New Orleans Advocate opinion page prominently features the conventional wisdom of political columnist Stephanie Grace, the curmudgeonly wit of veteran James Gill, and the all out right wing nuttery of Dan Fagan. Gill and Grace get some things right some of the time but, mostly, this is a centrist-to-conservative leaning page. The T-P's Jarvis DeBerry is a pretty moderate columnist himself but would add a relatively more progressive voice to this lot if they were to bring him on.  We've not seen or heard anything to indicate the Advocate management is inclined to go that direction, though. While pitching the Advocate's new online paywall to readers last month, editor Peter Kovacs chose to highlight the work of only one columnist in particular.

Six days a week, Smiley Anders captures the wit, kindness and good humor of the people of Louisiana. And even if the rest of the news centers on crime or crisis, you can’t read his column without walking away an optimist.

But maybe none of this matters. The significance of a newspaper opinions page is greatly diminished in the age of social media. Takes, even "good' takes, are cheap. Write your own whenever you like and share them with your friends. The value produced by a newspaper is in the actual news reporting. And John Georges just fired a whole lot of reporters.

It's never a good time for that. But it doesn't improve matters that Georges fired everybody during the height of the legislative session. At the very moment the mayor and the tourism industry are supposedly on the verge of a deal, and as the city council prepares to make a major decision on the future of the short term rental problem, nearly half of the beat reporters responsible for keeping an eye on that stuff just learned they're about to be on the street.

If any of that is worrisome to Lens editor Jed Horne, he isn't about to tell us. Instead he spends most of this editorial gloating. 

But starting a rival paper that was better than the T-P wasn’t the end of the drama. Now Kovacs and Shea  will run the whole shebang for Georges. Meanwhile, the buzz on the street is that the remaining T-P staff has been given layoff notices and 60 days of severance pay. Enjoying the pick of the litter, The Advocate is expected to offer jobs to a handful of reporters who toiled for its former rival. The reconfigured paper will begin publishing in June.

Yay! Everybody is fired and now has to grovel to one of the slimiest billionaires in the state. Why does Horne love this so much?  If there's one positive thing we can say for the six year "newspaper war" it's that the number of reporting jobs in New Orleans declined at a less dramatic rate than they otherwise would have. Now that anomaly has met with an abrupt end. Horne goes on to predict that the Times-Georges monopoly is likely to cull the ranks further. How are we supposed to feel about that?  Horne seems confused.

The Advocate editors sure aren't.  They think it's great.  And they're looking forward to welcoming "some" new colleagues.

We look forward to welcoming some new colleagues, serving new subscribers, helping new advertisers grow their businesses — and tirelessly listening to all of the voices in the great communities we serve.

So congratulations to those guys.  Everybody else, have fun reapplying for some of your jobs.

It was puzzling yesterday to see a few commenters describe the late news wars as a "David vs. Goliath" contest. Lamar uses those terms in his title here, though he only does that in a pointed, sort of ironic way.  He also hints at something in this paragraph that a lot of people have either missed or purposefully ignored so far. 

The decision to fire the entire staff, in one fell swoop, has been roundly criticized on social media by the paper’s readers and among fellow members of the press, while the announcement of the purchase has been met with a range of reactions. Still, among journalists and mass media professionals, the consensus seems to be one of cautious optimism and a sense of relief. In recent years, the Times-Picayune has been faltering under poor corporate management.

Why would a sudden mass firing be met with "cautious optimism and a sense of relief" among media professionals?  The most likely reason is they all expected to be losing their jobs soon anyway. It's possible Advance was getting set to shutter the T-P whether Georges bought it or not. Still, the move hardly makes him any kind of savior. He's just stripping the carcass.

Anyway John Georges  vs. Advance/Newhouse isn't a  David and Goliath story. It's more like Goliath vs. Very Sick And Dying Goliath.  And regardless of which Goliath wins, the losers are journalists, support staff and readers. Or maybe it's all just the natural way of market economics.  We don't really need two newspapers in a town like New Orleans where so very little news happens, right? 

One thing we did learn was this dumb Darren Rovell tweet from back in January turned out to be more accurate than anyone knew.  And that's the strangest news to come out of any of this.

"Times-Advocate" Now THAT is some breaking news... https://t.co/zpFEJ2VpXl

— skooks (@skooks) January 24, 2019

Backlog of stuff

Man... I still didn't publish the second half of the Mardi Gras posts I had been working on.  I wrote up a whole bunch of stuff about the Zulu blackface controversy which, I suppose, can sit until next year when I'm pretty sure people will be talking about that again.  I also had some things in there about the drunk driving accident which is still relevant and will probably get dumped into something else I'm trying to finish.  Meanwhile, here are some quick notes from this week before that stuff piles up on me too.



It's city-wide investment property open house season. We used to call that Jazzfest. But things are kind of different now in the "year of enforcement," as the mayor likes to call it. Also the steady stream of people I keep seeing drive slowly through the neighborhood with little notebooks says more about what goes on now. Anyway I heard a rumor that City Council is about to take up the Short Term Rentals thing again soon... as early as next week, perhaps. There are a couple of different bills  before the legislature right now that would impose new taxes on STRs as one instrument in the sprawling and sputtering search for a grand bargain between the city and the tourism industry. If lawmakers successfully tie the fate of STRs to the prospect of infrastructure revenues, it follows that City Council would be even more positively inclined to their proliferation than they already are.  Which means we can look forward to seeing even more long time residents displaced by investment properties. Nobody will live here but at least we'll be able to pay for nobody's drainage.



The "Together For Parks and Recreation" moneywad is putting out on an all-out media blitz this week in favor of hooking Ron Forman up with a dedicated millage for twenty more years.  They've got  mailers, TV ads, all sorts of endorsements from elected persons and editorial writers.  It's pretty disgusting.  What's worse is even the more skeptical notes I've read are reserved in their criticism of this measure which, pretty obviously, should be rejected. But there's too much wealth and political status sitting behind it and nobody really likes to challenge the money power in this city.

Basically there are three kinds of people who will vote for this thing. They are:

1) Cynical allies of the con-profit oligarchy who have a direct financial interest and/or adjacent political interest in helping them win something.

2) Cynical political actors who have an interest in having been "on the mayor's side" of something in case they want to ask her for something else later.

3) Idiots. I like the idiots. At least they're honest.

In any case, since those are pretty much all three categories of voter that exist in New Orleans, I'm pretty sure the millage is going to pass in a landslide. Oh well. On to the next disaster.

Let's see what else? I knew there was something I wanted to mention.

Oh yeah it was CCC last weekend.



I did a slightly more robust Mardi Gras this year than last so my training was a bit behind schedule. During the Lenten season I ran a full 6.2 miles only three times coming in at or about 56 minutes. That's fine, I guess. But also there were a number of outings when I had to stop altogether after 4 or 5 miles. So I wasn't sure what to expect coming in to race day. And this is why I made the stupid mistake of neglecting to lie about my estimated time so I could sign up for the green corrall instead of the red.



It wouldn't have even been that much of a lie. 56 is just a minute over the dividing threshold. But your starting group makes a huge difference in the lived experience of this race.  The reds are ostensibly joggers but the group is loaded up with baby strollers, walking clubs, bunny costumes, and all sorts of obstacles that end up making the first mile as much a lateral run as it is forward. It's fine that all that stuff goes on. But for some reason I always forget it's going to happen and I've only been doing this thing for twenty years or so. Maybe next time I'll know better.

Anyway I managed to finish. In 53:40 at that, so I could have signed up in the green group and that wouldn't have been dishonest in the first place.  Still, the trend is not good.  Last year was 52:13. The year before that was 48:31. But let's not worry about that too much just yet.  See, I won one of these participation trophies.



They also give you one of these at the post-race festvial.  But be careful. If you are trying to drink your water from it, you only get a couple of sips before you are prompted to subscribe.



Not this site, though. The Yellow Blog will always be free... if we can manage to keep it updated.  Until Google decides to shutter it, of course.

So sad about the "uncivil" left

Look what they reduce our country's poor beleaguered mayors to.  

A Pennsylvania mayor is apologizing for posting Facebook images urging police to "bring the hoses" against protesters and blast them with water cannons, evoking images of the civil rights era.

Karen Peconi is the mayor of Arnold, a suburb of Pittsburgh.

I'm just glad there's nothing to eat in suburban Pennsylvania besides Dairy Queens and bar wings otherwise some very bad people might deprive her of a nice meal or something.  And that, more than anything else, would make the Advocate sad. 

Here in food-centric Louisiana, where the dinner table is the altar of civic and social life, the thought of turning someone away from a meal seems especially off-key. That’s what happened Friday night when President Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was asked to leave a Washington, D.C. area restaurant by the owner, who dislikes the president’s policies.

Okay let's stop right there for a sec because the anonymous troll who writes these editorials is already leaving some important facts out.  To begin with, the restaurant owner quietly and asked Sanders to leave after having asked her employees whether or not they felt comfortable serving her. They voted no. Rather than force them to work under morally compromising conditions, she respected their decision.

The Advocate erases the staff entirely and assigns all agency to the owner who they say "dislikes president's polices."  The editorialist(s) deliberately obscure(s) circumstances here because it is his/her/their intent to diminish the actual reasons for the restaurant staff's differences with the Trump Administration in the first place. Rather than name the abhorrent "Zero Tolerance" immigration brutality that has been ripping families apart and placing them into camps, the Advocate troll(s) merely say(s) "The president and his politics are deeply controversial." They then go on to lament the damper this has put on their ability to enjoy their own charmed little lives.

But in Louisiana, we know perhaps more than most about the value of breaking bread with friends — and even adversaries. It’s a way to affirm our basic humanity amid sometimes painful differences.

Imagine wanting to "break bread with" and "affirm the basic humanity" of someone who is systematically locking thousands of humans up in cages. Most of us can't do that.  The reason the Advocate can, though, is because staying within the relative good graces of the monsters who rule us is essential to the success of any commercial media operation. And a favorite means to this is  negating legitimate anti-establishment criticism by way of the "civility" trope. A recent episode of the Citations Needed podcast explored this rather thoroughly. This is from the episode description.

Mean words or questioning motives are signs of declining civility and the subject of much lament from our media class. However, op-eds explicitly advocating war, invasion, sanctions, sabotage, bombing and occupation or cutting vital programs and lifelines for the poor are just the cost of doing business. What’s rhetorically out of bounds - and what isn’t - is far more a product of power than any objective sense of "civility" or “decency.”

The norms fetishists at the Advocate are sufficiently isolated from the real consequences of the politics they are paid to report on that they can afford to chummily "break bread with friends -- even with adversaries," as they say in their op-ed.  Their professional culture incentivizes flattering politicians and the donor class. By necessity it also minimizes empathy with their victims.

This is why they can pretend the unpleasantness that characterized this year's legislative sessions was a mere matter the governor and Republican leaders not getting together over a plate of catfish.  Louisiana residents who depend on medicaid and SNAP funds for their survival may find this metaphor obscene if not downright uncivil.

What was the Civil War fought over?

Today's Advocate literally cannot say it was about slavery.

The Civil War involved a central question of civil society. Would we be a nation bound by a common commitment to constitutional order, or a country compromised by the chaos of factionalism? The conclusion of that conflict, purchased by the blood and anguish of an America divided against itself, was supposed to make us whole once more.

The Civil War happened because people weren't bi-partisan enough, apparently.  Who writes the Advocate editorials? I just think if they're gonna blame "both sides" for the Charlottesville violence then they ought to at least put their name to it. 

Update: See also Chris Lehmann on the kind of Bothsidesism in evidence at the Advocate today. 

The above-the-fray notion that “both sides do it” is a species of magical thinking perpetrated by those with a deep institutional investment in upholding status-quo power relations: network presidents, centrist pundits, the Atlantic’s editorial politburo, and moguls of various monotonous description. So by both sociopathic personal temperament and class outlook, Trump has adopted the same blame-dodging as protective coloring (as it were).  

Practically a tourist attraction

John Georges's new The New Orleans Advocate headquarters is open for business.  You might think that business is running a newspaper but the way this reads, it sounds more like they're managing an event space that just happens to have a newspaper in the building.

The Advocate’s renovation stripped the building to its beams, then painstakingly restored the original look. In addition to the Advocate offices, the 20,000-square foot building has a large assembly and event space, as well as a second-floor suite with additional entertainment space and a recessed balcony for Mardi Gras parade-watching. The lobby, once the car dealer showroom, is connected to the second floor by a new feature, a 20-foot high spiral staircase that overlooks the lobby and the newsroom.

A coffee shop is also planned, which will connect with the building's lobby, with the aim of creating a community gathering place. The Advocate plans to have a series of events around Mardi Gras, using custom-built reviewing stands.

If you are curious about rates and availability for your upcoming event, the article doesn't say anything about booking.  So it's a little late into this year's social season to start hosting the deb parties and Carnival balls and stuff.  Eventually, the plan is for Nell Nolan not to have to leave the office. 

And they said I was the "snarky" one

Interesting aside from a list of political blurbs compiled by The Advocate today. 

One of the more ringing calls for removing the Confederate monuments came from Danatus King, the former head of the local NAACP branch who ran against Landrieu in 2014.

Noting that he and the mayor often disagreed, he said they agree now on the need to remove “symbols of hate” that “glorify people that were the terrorists and traitors of a terrible time in our country’s history.”

He ended his news release this way: “The time is now. The statutes (sic) must come down.”

Of course, bringing down all the statutes could leave a lawyer like King with very little business.

I'm writing a longer post about the monuments which I'll have up either tonight or tomorrow. But I thought this was worth a separate note.  I get that Danatus King is given to fits of self-promotion and it's fine for the Advocate to point that out. But it would be nice if they could flesh that out with a little more context. Or, better, refrain from taking this particular opportunity to say anything in that regard.

As it is, this little throwaway line strongly implies that The Advocate intends to characterize the entire movement to take down these white supremacist markers as insincere hucksterism.  Maybe that's what they really believe over there in Georges country.  But this is kind of a backhanded way of saying so.

Thanks for saying it

Ricky Matthews and Jim Amoss must not have been invited to any Gumbo PAC parties. 

Our state needs a committed, resolute chief executive with a desire to govern and a plan to lead on many fronts.

David Vitter is that leader.

Ha ha good one.  Oh wait.. they're serious.  Okay why, though? 

His understanding of how Washington works and his connections there should help the state maximize federal resources for its $50 billion coastal master plan.

There is arguably no more important issue for South Louisiana than shoring up the coast. Lives depend on it, and Sen. Vitter knows that.

Well certainly that makes a lot of sense.  Who better than "Big Oil's boy" to get right to work on fixing the coast big oil destroyed?  It's really ingenious in a counter-intuitive sort of way if you think about it. (Don't think too hard about it, though.)  Anyway, tell us more about "how Washington works." 

We are convinced that Sen. Vitter, having witnessed the paralysis of government in Washington, will understand the need to build consensus while not giving in to the forces that keep us mired in mediocrity.

This is the biggest laugh line in the whole editorial.  Never mind the part about having witnessed a trainwreck, Vitter now knows how a train works. Vitter didn't just "witness the paralysis of government in Washington," David Vitter was the paralysis in Washington.  Look. Everybody hates Vitty, including the Republicans there. 

Many Republicans also hate Vitter in Louisiana, by the way.  The polling has shown this all along. This is why he has two strong GOP opponents in the primary and  big PACs organized on the specific purpose of electing anybody but him.  But, OK, he knows how to "build consensus" says the TP. We'll take that under advisement.

This election has been a particularly disappointing showing for the local press. The reporting has been mostly good as usual, but the editorial side of things has ranged from incompetent to insulting. I'll say more about this later in the week.

But let's give the T-P credit at least for one thing.  At least they make endorsements.  The Advocate, by contrast, makes recommendations about ballot measures like constitutional amendments or local tax propositions but it does not endorse candidates. This is a fundamental failure on their part to provide the transparency their readers deserve. Every news organization has a point of view.  They're all owned by some person or corporation. They all make hires and set standards in accordance with the views of the organization.  It's okay for them to tell us what those views are. Rather than diminishing the overall quality of the publication, it helps the reader understand how to interpret what they're reading.

The T-P still does some good reporting. It employs some talented writers.. even if it now employs fewer of them and treats them poorly.  All the Vitter endorsement does is confirm that their management is comprised of the shitty people we thought it was.  But the pretentious lie that the Advocate provides a "view from nowhere" is actually worse than that.  Are they better or worse than the T-P? Who knows? They aren't telling us. What are they hiding?

The T-P is run by terrible terrible people. But at least they aren't afraid to say so. The Advocate really should start being more honest with their readers. Otherwise we're going to go on assuming the worst.

Robust redux

So this photo revisit is a little different.  The original subject is a photo I didn't get around to taking until 2012.  But it's of something I'd had for a long time already.



"Katrina Puts End to Lull," it says. That's the Saturday paper. The more famous headline is the following day's "Katrina Takes Aim." But I evacuated Sunday morning and lost that day's paper. You can find pictures of it all over the internet, of course. Here's one I just googled.   "Puts end to lull" is a more intriguing headline, though.  I think it better captures the upheaval that was on the way. We were all about to be profoundly shaken out of our lull.  We may only now have begun to recapture it.

But this isn't really a post about that.  This is supposed to be one of those posts where we go back to the scene of an interesting photo from immediate post-K times and look at how it's changed. Here's how we're going to do that.

A few years after Katrina, you might remember there was an event we here at the Yellow Blog called "Crazy Freak Out '08" on account of what we were certain was a traumatized overreaction to the approach of Hurricane Gustav.  The Crazy Freak Out ended up being more valid than we anticipated as Gustav did end up setting off an evacuation.  The storm didn't destroy the city all over again but it did cause extended power outages all over town as well as angst over a bizarre "tiered" reentry plan.

As it became clear that Gustav would probably be a thing, I got out and took some pictures of the preparations.  One thing I made sure to get a shot of was the T-P front page.



I did the same thing a few years later when we went through the drill again with Isaac.



But something else was happening at that time to the Times-Picayune itself. Its parent company Advance Publications was implementing a nationwide "digital first" strategy which, despite the typical corporate buzzwording about being adaptable but "robust," was really all about firing lots of people.

Former T-P staff writer Rebecca Theim wrote a book about it. She recaps some of the story in this article.

In May 2012, New Orleanians and employees of The Times-Picayune learned via The New York Times that a small circle of Picayune senior editors and managers were plotting a dramatic new course for the newspaper. Advance would put the publication at the center of a bold experiment in U.S. journalism: New Orleans would become the largest American city without a daily newspaper. The daily Times-Picayune would be replaced with a three-day-a-week publication and an expanded NOLA.com, the newspaper’s website that was routinely criticized as mediocre. The changes would involve deep staff cuts at an organization that had never instituted an involuntary layoff. Additional savings would result from reduced printing and delivery costs.

Almost immediately, the community went berserk. A grassroots campaign included dedicated Facebook pages and Twitter accounts with thousands of followers, an online petition that eventually garnered close to 10,000 signatures, 1,500 yard signs supporting a daily newspaper, and public protests. A New Orleans philanthropist recruited a who’s who of city business and civic leaders to lobby against the changes, while the owner of the city’s NFL and NBA franchises publicly pursued acquiring the newspaper.

The specter of Katrina fueled the campaign. As Miller, Roberts, and LaPoe noted in Oil and Water, “… the protest underscored the significance and essence of local news, a relationship solidified by Katrina.”

Despite a valiant community effort, more than 200 employees, including one-half of the newsroom, got their pink slips. Mounting anxiety and uncertainty over future employment then prompted a rash of defections to other media outlets locally and across the country that continued well into the next year. In response, The Times-Picayune rescinded the terminations of at least 10 employees, but “digital first” and its reduced publication schedule went into effect October 1, 2012.

Since then, Advance has continued its strategy of firing its way to success.  Recently we learned that Times-Picayune staff are preparing for yet another round of cuts this fall.

This week I went back to the corner where I'd taken those photos of the T-P paper box before Gustav and Isaac.  Katrina was back in the news, of course.  But something else was different.



I should mention also that Rebecca Theim will be at Rising Tide X next Saturday talking about the changing face of local media.

Rising Tide X is August 29, 2015 at Xavier University. Check out the rest of the website for details about the extensive program. You can go for free this year but please register here. If you'd like to help defray the cost of production or order swag, there's a separate GoFundMe page here.   

Watchdog

Special edition Advocate delivered to Superdome seats for the Saints' home opener vs Atlanta


From a 2012 NPR story on the loss of a daily paper in New Orleans:

John McCusker, who has been a staff photographer at the Times-Picayune since 1986, lost his job in the restructuring.

"The main thing is I'm sad for this city," he said outside a local bar where laid-off workers met to commiserate. "You take away the Times-Picayune, and there are a bunch of police officers that were on the Danziger Bridge that would still be on the streets today.

"You take away the Times-Picayune, and Aaron Broussard would still be president of Jefferson Parish. The watchdog role of this newspaper cannot be underestimated."

McCusker was talking about how reporters exposed corrupt politicians and even a police plot to cover up civilian killings after Hurricane Katrina. The paper's storm coverage earned a Pulitzer Prize.

Since then, the Advocate has entered the New Orleans market with a daily printed paper to fill this crucial "watchdog" role we all lamented last year. Here are some interesting facts about the new watchdog.

 It is owned by millionaire and sometime politician John Georges.

It is "the official paper" of the Tom Benson corporate welfare empire. 

Its new ad sends a bit of a strange message.

If you haven’t seen The New Orleans Advocate’s new television campaign, you probably will soon. The brisk, clever ads emphasize the paper’s daily delivery schedule and feature local personalities — Archie Manning, Irma Thomas, Rita Benson LeBlanc, Andrea Apuzzo, the 610 Stompers — ringing a doorbell and handing copies of The New Orleans Advocateto a surprised homeowner. It’s all set to a jazzy soundtrack and the familiar Yat growl of Ronnie Virgets: “New Orleans is at ya do’ — seven days a week.”

But it’s not all chefs, musicians and sports figures. Among the familiar faces ringing the doorbell are several elected officials: Jefferson Parish President John Young and Sheriff Newell Normand; St. Tammany Parish President Pat Brister; and New Orleans City Council Vice President Stacy Head.

“Business is good in Jefferson Parish!” Young says, handing the homeowner a newspaper, while Head announces, “Here’s the latest from the City Council!”

Most newspapers’ marketing departments — including that of The New Orleans Advocate — are completely separate from their newsroom operations. Nonetheless, using elected officials in ads for a newspaper is a new one on Kelly McBride, the house ethics expert at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school for journalism in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“The Advocate obviously has a competitive relationship with The Times-Picayune,” McBride told Gambit. “If the politicians join The Advocate in sharing that message, what does that say about The Advocate’s ability to critically examine those politicians?”

In any commercial news gathering outfit there are times when the news and marketing divisions are working at cross purposes.  One imagines an ad where politicos show up at your door and tell you what to read might make the news staff uncomfortable. The Gambit addresses this question with journalism ethicist David Craig.

"It raises questions in my mind around the issue of independence, and the principle of acting independently comes into play here, though it may be more of an issue of perception than reality,” Craig said. “It doesn’t make me start worrying that the members of the newsroom aren’t credible, but it does make me wonder what members of the public might think about it.”

Okay, sure, obviously the pros in the newsroom aren't compromised by a TV ad.  But couching this as a mere "perception" problem is too dismissive. John Georges is making himself, his friends, and connections a part of the Advocate brand on purpose.  Eventually that comes to mean something whether that thing is openly stated or not.

What could possibly go wrong?

Dathel, John Georges with Gayle, Tom Benson, Rita Benson LeBlanc official newspaper of #Saints and #Pelicans pic.twitter.com/SFpov6tvkw
— New Orleans Advocate (@theadvocateno) September 4, 2013

A different lie

This is a Romenesko blurb about John Georges admitting to lying about a meeting he apparently didn't have with the Newhouses. But then, in the comments, Georges pops in to say that the thing he said before about a thing he said not being true is also not true.  Neat.

I'm just glad that this is all happening in a Facebook comment forum since  Georges' own paper assures us those are the most believable sort of comments and less likely to "reflect poorly on the state."

Everything that goes robust, comes robust

Turns out John Georges also thinks the newspaper business employs too many people.

Band back together

The Advocate is hiring more ex T-Pers.

Longtime New Orleans political columnist Stephanie Grace and Times-Picayune reporter Laura Maggi are the latest names to join the New Orleans edition of The Advocate.

Grace, who declined a job offer from The TImes-Picayune last year following the paper's restructuring, will return to print three times weekly with a column that will appear Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. (Most recently, she has written a series of cover stories as a contributor to Gambit.) Last week, James Gill, another veteran T-P columnist, jumped to The Advocate, where his column appears twice weekly.

"I'm back to doing what I always did — writing about local and state politics — and really excited to be part of the conversation in Baton Rouge," Grace told Gambit this morning. "I'm picking up where I left off, and surrounded by some of my favorite people who happen to be great journalists."

It's hard to deny that the New Orleans newspaper war is a compelling story. But it's important to note that so far it's basically a story about one paper being brought back from the dead.. much of it anyway.

From an overall employment standpoint, it's still a negative. A lot of people lost their jobs when Newhouse decided to gut the T-P.  Aside from the high-profile hires The Advocate is poaching, most of those jobs aren't coming back. And, of course, the overall quantity of reportage on public affairs in New Orleans is about the same or somewhat reduced. And even that is likely reaching only a fraction of its former audience.

Still, it's good to see these people back in print on a regular basis.  And if Stephanie Grace's fact-based but generally conventional wisdom driven columns about local politics are indicative of some nefarious "left wing bias" at The Advocate, well I guess we'll just have to live with that.

Speaking of John Georges and "left wing bias" here is some terrific nostalgia for you. 

In case anyone is reading who needs context on that last link, it's not really Geroges displaying anything other than rank cynicism. He was speaking to the Orleans Parish Democratic Executive Committee in a clumsy attempt to win a mayoral endorsement. Of course everyone in the room understood Georges was insincerely pandering (condescending, really) to the audience and so nobody took anything he said seriously. Also, a less ridiculously goofy delivery probably wouldn't have hurt matters.

There once was a time when politicians could get away with radically altering their rhetoric and  positions according to whatever audience they were trying to sucker. But this episode clearly demonstrated just how different circumstances have become.  Because modern media allows us to see more of the picture, pols who alter themselves this radically from one speaking engagement to the next are seen as the hypocrites they are. (Of course, all politicians are dirty ugly hypocrites but few of them are this blatant about it anymore.)

The fact that he was embarrassed by his own words in this recording prompted Georges, at a later stage in the campaign, to bemoan the existence of "dangerous people on the internet." And thus a meme was born. And now this champion of free speech owns a newspaper.  Neat.

Quote of the Day

You know if I were to go back through the near decade's worth of "Quote of the Day" posts on this blog and sort the quotes according to their originators, I have a strong suspicion the greatest number of those will have come from James Gill.

James Gill, whose acerbic wit and incisive columns about Louisiana politics and peccadillos have appeared in The Times-Picayune since 1986, is the latest T-P name to jump ship to The Advocate.

"It's very hard to make out a quote, because quotes are all bullshit," Gill told Gambit tonight. "But I am delighted to go to the highest bidder, I am happy to be renewing my association with [former Times-Picayune managing editor, now Advocate editor] Peter Kovacs — and I am delighted we have a newspaper war again after so many years."

This seems somewhat significant

Pulitzer winners leave Times-Picayune for The Advocate

Four leading reporters and editors from The Times-Picayune, including Pulitzer Prize winners who covered Hurricane Katrina, signed up to work for The Advocate Wednesday, a week after businessman John Georges bought the daily newspaper and promised to beef up its operations in New Orleans. 

Aside from James Gill's and Jarvis Deberry's columns and the still quite robust sports coverage,  I'm having a hard time coming up with much reason to look at the T-P anymore.  The Advocate still has a long way to go to get to where it can cover as much ground as it needs to.  It also needs a more active website with the capacity to post breaking news throughout the day. 

Sooner or later John Georges is bound to do something screwy with his new toy but for now he's building a better one; one that looks like it's trying to be a serious newspaper. While he's doing that, I suppose it's worth supporting that effort with reservations.

As for the overall "state of journalism" or whatever in New Orleans, I think we're probably slightly worse off than we had been.  There are still good people doing good reporting but it's reaching a more fragmented audience. I know there's some effort to mitigate that via resource sharing and "alliances" and stuff but it's not quite what it ought to be. Not yet anyway.   Maybe a decent daily paper will help there.

Update: Hmm... looks like Georges may have opened a vein.

"If Gordon and Martha go," a city reporter told Gambit Saturday night, "we all go."

Welp

I know there are people applauding this for whatever reason, but I don't see it.

John Georges, who took over a small family company and transformed it into a billion-dollar business, completed a deal Tuesday to buy The Advocate, the largest daily newspaper in Louisiana.

I guess this helps put the TPStreets fiasco in context.  NOLA Media Group must have figured they had to do something to compete with Georges' apparent plan to expand The Advocate's presence in New Orleans. Maybe that's not so bad since that means putting more of the former T-P staff back to work.  But it also means they're all working for John Georges.  Good for them.  Probably not so good for us.

Will be fun, though.

The Daily Goat

So now the daily paper belongs to Georges.

Maybe a little more than a third of the local TV market belongs to Tom Benson.  Garland Robinette belongs to Fred Heebe. And, of course, NOLA.com belongs to an evil conglomerate out to destroy the universe. (Locally they belong to the GNO Inc/Chamber of Commerce crowd which is practically the same thing anyway.)

All around, it's a very robust journalism scene these days.

Cool and Current

I wonder if John Georges thinks he is buying the internet for his children.

That's not why he wants into newspapers, he said. He is doing this partly for the sake of his children because the business is "cool, digital and current" and thus "more suited to their skill sets and generation." We'll see if Georges has a future in the business.

Just a few years ago, Georges was concerned that there were too many "dangerous people" in digital media. Now that the "legitimate" operators are pushing their way in... and working harder and harder to push you out... Georges sees something "cool and current" there.  Funny how that works.